The Eternal Paradox Of Faith

Sydney Morning Herald

Wednesday April 12, 1995

MORRIS WEST

THE older I get, the easier it is to understand the meaning of myths and to accept to live with mysteries.

Myths and mysteries co-exist in human life but they are not the same. Myths are stories, legends, fables, handed down through the centuries. They express, though they do not explain, what the "old ones", those who went before us, thought about where they came from, where they would end, how and why they should comport themselves in their social lives. Most important of all, they help us to come to terms with the bleak paradoxes of human existence.

We humans still struggle to preserve the illusion of immortality, cherishing it as Israel once cherished the Ark of the Covenant. Born under sentence of death, we still plant apple trees whose fruit we will never eat. Builders raise giant cities for other folk to live in. Even the hedonists make their own defiance of the sorry bargain of life - sweet wine poured out to absent gods, soft kisses spent of golden girls and boys before they wither into toothless age.

The believers are the lucky ones. They make a mockery of the death sentence, like the bull-leapers of ancient Crete, convinced that one day, one last somersault will project them out of the envelope of flesh into a pacific eternity of union with the One who is concealed under the mask of the Many...

But belief is a gift, like poetry or divination or the wonderful imagination of a happy child. If you have not the gift - or if you lose it - you are thrust back on reason. Noblest of the faculties, said the old Greeks, but still no key to the mystery and the paradox and the tragedy of the human condition. On the contrary, reason can become an executioner's axe unless the reasons of the heart are spoken to protest the tragic nonsense of human syllogisms.

In order to survive against the threat of madness in a mad world, to resist the impulse to psychotic fugue from situations too complex to cope with, one has to find a standpoint from which one cannot retreat, from which one may hope to progress to a deeper understanding and a more contented acceptance of one's own existence and the universe which one so briefly inhabits.

It may be the standpoint of the existentialist, who says: "This is what I am. This is all I know. I must therefore come to terms with existence for better or for worse." It may be the position of the believer who says: "I believe thus and my belief gives me all the answers I need to survive." It may be that of the agnostic who says: "I do not know. I accept not to know."

To arrive at the standpoint involves an act of acceptance, an act of faith or no faith, it makes no matter. Without this act, sanity is impossible. There is only the howling confusion of a wasteland.

Where do I stand? I stand on the proclamation of the Easter mystery made by Paul the Apostle: "That Christ died for your sins, according to the scriptures; that he was buried; and that he rose again the third day ... So we preach: and so you have believed ... And if Christ be not risen, then is our teaching vain!"

This is the kerygma, the most ancient formula of Christian faith. It is repeated every day in the Eucharistic ritual: "Christ died, Christ is risen, Christ will come again."

Do I believe it? Yes. Can I prove it by logic, by history, by scientific method? No. Can I, who deal in language, express in words what happened between the death of Jesus, his burial, and the discovery of the empty tomb? No. As to the authority of contemporary witnesses to the passion and death of Jesus and his later risen presence, I cannot debate with men and women long dead and turned to dust.

So, I admit I do not know what happened. I am therefore an agnostic. With equal formality I claim that I am a believer, because I commit, in faith, to a testimony handed down through two millennia.

On the other hand, I will not impose my belief on others. I claim the right as a free man to profess it openly, but never, never a right to turn it into a weapon against others. The sunlight falls into each room from a different angle, and who am I to dictate how the creator illuminates the soul of another man or woman.

I can walk only by the light which is given to me - which, let me say it plainly, casts its own shadows, and sometimes absents itself, so that I must sit quietly in the dark and wait for it to come again. I am always intrigued by that ancient phrase in the Apostles' Creed, which emphasises the death of Jesus: "He descended into the lower regions." For the Jews of olden times, the lower regions were "Sheol", for the gentiles "Hades" or the "kingdom of the dead".

It is a concept which belongs to an ancient cosmogony; but it is still part of the mystery which haunts all our lives. Where do we go when we die? The Pauline metaphor expresses it better for us: "I live now, not I, but Christ liveth in me." We die in Christ; we are buried in Christ; we rise with Christ.

The more one reads, travels and experiences, the greater light one finds both in the myths and the mysteries bequeathed to us. For years, every summer, I cruised the Mediterranean with my family on our own vessel, the Golden Salamander. For all of us these annual excursions to remote places provided a continuous unfolding of ancient experience.

The sacred places of today had always been sacred to one God or another. The power that had resided there still resided. The memories of what had been enacted there were still current. The voyages of Odysseus and Jason were not just fables, they were realities remembered from the days of square sails and men labouring at the oars against unfavourable winds. On Cos, the island of healing, they still grew the same herbs which were dispensed in the time of Pericles.

So, in the same fashion, the assent to mystery is not a demeaning act. It is an ennobling and an enlightening one. It ensures that we are no longer centred upon ourselves, but that we reach out continually to a further light fixed like the pole star in the dark vault of the sky. The mystery of the dark vault continues to deepen, even as we contemplate it, but the guide star still remains.

The last social act of Jesus' life was to preside over a Passover supper with his disciples. The Passover for the Jewish people - and Jesus was a Jew who preached and prayed and debated in the synagogues - is a feast of national liberation. For Christians, Easter is a celebration of cosmic liberation: from the fear of death, from the terror of an unknown future, from the guilt of our own misdeeds, because the Passion and the death of Jesus were an act of universal atonement.

All of us, believers and unbelievers, owe God a death. The Resurrection is both a promise of personal survival and of ultimate union with the source of our being.